Plot:

*Spoiler Warning

Joanna and Walter Eberhart and their two children move from New York City to Stepford, Conneticut. In this quaint town they find glamorous housewives who delight in waxing floors and cleaning ovens. Joanna does not fair well in this environment: “She [Joanna] hates the mindless housewifery of the cosmetically correct Stepford women and describes herself as a professional photographer interested in tennis and ‘the Women’ Lib movement”. Joanna suspects that something isn’t quite right in the town and soon discovers that the Men’s Association disposes of the wives and replaces them with robots who have enhanced anatomies and reduced personalities. Although Joanna foils the mystery of the Stepford women it is not in enough time. She and her two normal friends are killed by the men of Stepford and replaced with gynoid versions of themselves.

( Shippey)

Analyses through Quotations:

• Levin’s novel highlights the incarceration of women in a male dominated society, which is why he prefaces the novel with a quotation from Simone de Beauvoir’s  The Second Sex (1949) where she describes women’s endeavor to escape from a patriarchal “prison”. ( Shippey)
• “Levin’s novel may be regarded as a satire of patriarchal paranoia.” ( Shippey)
• “The men of Stepford, however, find the robots more beautiful than they do their human wives. Unlike women, robots do not age, wrinkle, or gain weight.” (Silver)
• “Sexually, also, the robots are designed only to cater to their husbands’ sexual desires and to have no desires of their own: they are sexual objects rather than sexual subjects.” (Silver)
• “The robots unlike liberated women, do not argue for their own sexual pleasure, do not attempt to pursue their own careers, do not ask their husbands to share the housework, and, finally, remain beautiful as their husbands age.” (Silver)
• “Levin wrote it as a savage comment on a media-driven society which values the pursuit of youth and beauty above all else.” (From foreword of 1998 edition of The Stepford Wives by Bryan Forbes, director of the 1974 film version)